Studies in hysteria / by Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud ; authorized translation with an introduction by A.A. Brill.

  • Breuer, Josef, 1842-1925.
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies in hysteria / by Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud ; authorized translation with an introduction by A.A. Brill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    no role in the association and in memory, still lies ready in some manner and, what is more, in proper and good order. All that is necessary is to remove the resistances blocking the way. Barring that, everything is known as well as we know anything at all. The proper connections of the individual ideas among themselves and with the non-pathogenic, which are frequently remembered, are present; they have been produced in their time and retained in memory. The pathogenic psychic material appears as the property of an intelligence which is not necessarily inferior to the normal ego. The semblance of a second personality is often most delusively produced. Whether this impression is justified, whether the arrangement of the psychic material resulting after the adjustment is not transferred back into the period of the disease—these are questions, which I do not like to consider in this place. One cannot certainly describe the experiences gained from such analyses more easily and more clearly than by placing one’s self in the position which one may take for a survey after the whole thing has been completed. The situation is usually not so simple as one represents it in special cases, as, for example, in a single case in which a symptom originates through a large trauma. We frequently deal not with a single hysterical symptom, but with a number of such, which are partially independent of one another and partially connected. We must not expect a single traumatic reminiscence, and as its nucleus one single pathogenic idea, but we must be ready to assume a series of partial traumas and concatenations of pathogenic mental streams. The monosymptomatic traumatic hysteria is, as it were, an ele¬ mentary organism, a single being in comparison to the complicated structure of a grave hysterical neurosis, as we generally encounter it. The psychic material of such hysteria presents itself as a multi¬ dimensional formation of at least triple stratification. I hope to be able to justify soon this figurative expression. First of all there is a nucleus of such reminiscences (either experiences or mental streams) in which the traumatic moment culminated, or in which the pathogenic idea has found its purest formation. Around this nucleus we often find an incredibly rich mass of other memory material which we have to elaborate in the analysis in the triple arrangement mentioned before. In the first place, there is an unmis¬ takable linear chronological arrangement, which takes place within every individual theme. As an example of this, I can only cite the